My name is Kaur and I'm new in this forum.
I'm looking for some help to get things going on my website. Its eCommerce website built in Opencart. Digital Trade Solutions is online retail/wholesale company dealing mostly with consumer electronics. Please visit us at www.digitaltrade.eu.

I'm looking forward to hear some reviews and feedback about website. Every comment is much appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Kaur

06-01-2014, 10:22 AM

deathshadow

Well, it's kind of what I've come to expect from e-Commerce sites... unfortunately, that's not a good thing.

Painfully slow loading times (over 45 seconds here), illegible color contrasts (white on light blue, gray on dark gray), illegible fixed metric (px) fonts with fixed width design concepts -- that's the trifecta of /FAIL/ at web design right there. Handshakes ALONE on first-load is going to measure anywhere from 10 seconds to two minutes regardless of filesizes and connection speeds! More if the user is connection choked like on a shared public connection, or even at home in the age of torrents, netflix, hulu, wireless overhead...

... and given the slow loading time and broken attempt at a responsive layout, do I smell bootstrap AND jQuery before I even look at the code?

Well look at that, bootstrap and jQuery... well there's your problem.

DOZENS of separate files for nothing, endless pointless scripting not actually doing anything useful to end users... It's 102 separate files in THREE MEGABYTES -- and only a third of that is actually CONTENT IMAGES. There is no polite way to put this, that's developer ineptitude right there.

313k of CSS in 11 style sheets? FOR WHAT?!? There isn't a site out there that needs more than 48k of CSS with a limit of 2 sheets PER MEDIA TARGET, and looking at the code, the question becomes "WHAT MEDIA TARGETS?!?" Only four of the eleven stylesheets even bothers, and that's an incomplete "screen" only.

1.2 MEGABYTES of Javascript? FOR THAT? No. Even if you were knee deep in ajax for the shopping cart, there's no excuse for more than 48k of scripting, and frankly 24k would probably more like it.

... and then there's the main document itself -- 101k of CSS to deliver less than 3k of plaintext and maybe three dozen content images? No. that's anywhere from six to ten times the HTML that should have been used -- much of that can be blamed on that oh so wonderful crutch for lame developers known as bootstrap. If you don't know what's wrong with vomiting up markup like this:

You probably shouldn't be making websites. Why do I say this? because 99% of the time there's no reason for that on a layout as simple as that page to be more than:

Code:

<body>
<div id="top" class="widthWrapper">
<h1>

That's how bad even that simple little bit of code is... and that's some of the BETTER parts of this. Endless pointless DIV for nothing, gibberish use of numbered headings (what few of them are there), incomplete forms...

A bit of CSS to strip background, border and padding off BUTTON, and bang, NO JAVASCRIPT NEEDED for the same functionality.

... and if you could sneak by on "get" (don't see why not, but there is a GET parameter already in 'route') and were to extract where to redirect to using $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], that could be gutted down to:

That's a PERFECT example of what I mean when ranting and raving about "JavaScript for NOTHING." and people using JavaScript to replicate functionality that HTML can do WITHOUT JS! Waste of bandwidth, waste of time, and does nothing but illustrate the ignorance of the person who wrote it.

I'm sorry if this is going to upset you, but the truth hurts, and truth is that's such an ineptly developed train wreck of "how not to build a website" it's shocking it works at all; well over two thirds of the code being sent client side should be thrown away completely as pointless, redundant, and pretty much reeking of "HTML? What's that?" - and to be frank if the front end code is that bad, I don't even want to THINK about the disaster server-side...

...which is NOT a good thing when talking e-commerce.

06-02-2014, 07:03 AM

DigitalTrade

Thank You for the feedback.

According to http://tools.pingdom.com site loading speed is under 3 seconds which is really good. For me the loading speed is really fast and I have not heard any bad comments about site not loading. As for the coding yes I belive its not great. Its not done by me, Its open-source software opencart with custom theme. Few changes on the code made by me and at the moment I don't see it neccessery as everything is working. But You are correct it uses jQuery and bootstrap.
What about the whole design and concept of the website? Doesn't the blue look soft and making better feel ? What do You mean under "illegible fixed metric (px) fonts"?

Thank You for input.

06-07-2014, 05:29 AM

yoginetindia

At first look it looks perfect . When find time will review it deeply on different browsers and Mobile too , then will share my feedback.

Also can you share which open cart theme you used to get it developed . Is it free or paid.

greetings
Manmeet

06-07-2014, 04:32 PM

DigitalTrade

Thank You yoginetindia. The deeper review would be appreciated as it will help to improve the website. Its pavo metro theme used with opencart 1.5.6. Its customized and made look better. The site is still not fully completed as I have better ideas with homepage to make it convert betterly.

Looking forward to hear back from You.

Regards,
Kaur

Quote:

Originally Posted by yoginetindia

At first look it looks perfect . When find time will review it deeply on different browsers and Mobile too , then will share my feedback.

Also can you share which open cart theme you used to get it developed . Is it free or paid.

The problem with sites like pingdom is they are hosted on major backbones and just don't have 'real world' conditions. I have a horrifically bad ping time to your server; as does around two thirds the world just because of geography and network topology. YOU might be sitting on top of the server, pingdom might be sitting on top of the server, that doesn't mean that everyone is.

The page is built from 102 separate files; BEST CASE scenario for that on a empty-cache first-load is indeed around 3 seconds -- but that's best case. WORST CASE can be a minute and a half or more -- and that's JUST handshaking, not even counting file transfers because, well... it's built from 102 separate files.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DigitalTrade

But You are correct it uses jQuery and bootstrap.

Which is why it's bloated, slow loading, and difficult to use.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DigitalTrade

What about the whole design and concept of the website?

The fixed width layout, massive space wasting image rotator, and colour choices FAR below accessibility minimums means I'd pitch the entire design in the trash; there's little there I'd try to salvage. See the illegible white on blue in the menu, illegible cyan-blue on white in the body text, and the really illegible gray on gray in the footer.

Do the math -- did you know there's math for the accessibility of colors? You take the Y (luminance) componant of YUV of both colors, and if it's less than 50% it's illegible, and ideally it should be 75% or more.

Y = 29.9% Red + 58.7% Green + 11.4% Blue

For example, let's take your light blue on white. White is easy -- since the above adds up to 100%, 100% of 255 is 255. The light blue on the other hand is #30ADE7, so thats RGB(48,173,231) which:

So short of the 50% minimum it would be surprising if a quarter of the population can even tell if there's text there... made even worse by that footer text likely needing that 75% ideal or more since it's a small 'thin' font meaning font-smoothing actually darkens the render color as much as 33%.

Just because it's "pretty" doesn't mean it's USEFUL; or legible.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DigitalTrade

Doesn't the blue look soft and making better feel ? What do You mean under "illegible fixed metric (px) fonts"?

The fonts are declared in pixels, not %/em -- the WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines) says to use %/em for a reason, so users (like myself) aren't sent diving for the zoom, and instead the content text auto-enlarge WITHOUT zooming.

My computer for example the 'default' font size on which everything is based is 20px, NOT the 16px that's the default on most systems. As such text on properly written websites will auto-enlarge 25% without my having to go anywhere near the zoom. On my TV with it's 10 foot UI, it's 50% / 24px default.

As a rule of thumb, even at normal 16px default size, anything less than 14px has major legibility issues; whoever designed that theme with it's COMPLETELY USELESS 12px font sizes needs a good swift kick in the junk. I'm stuck zooming in 50% just to TRY and make that text a useful size, which with the fixed width layout results in side-scrolling or a broken layout; which compounded with the utterly useless color choices makes that entire page an accessibility train wreck.

... you figure in the illegible colors, illegible font sizes, inaccessible fixed width design DESPITE the alleged responsive layout bootstrap is supposed to be providing, and it's probably making a LOT of visitors bounce.

What's your bounce rate? 95%? More?

06-09-2014, 05:35 AM

alexjames212

I just reviewed your website and observed that its not optimized for any search engine. It is always good to optimize your site based on meta descriptions and titles. See that you sort out a unique primary keyword for all the pages in the site. There are several other factors too, like link building, social media optimization and so on. However, you should at least consider doing the basics right, ie the ON Page optimization.
Thanks,

06-12-2014, 02:09 AM

Websolution

Hello friends....

I have also developed the site that is for <a href="http://www.websitedesigningcompanydelhi.websolutioncentre.com">Website Designing Company In Delhi</a>.

Thanks

06-14-2014, 05:01 PM

DigitalTrade

Hey,

Appreciate all the feedback. As I have not received any complains about bad loading speed and bounce rate is 0.56 % according to google analytics. Yes there is many files. Opencart already have that kind of system. Yes I would trash it but its working for its purpose. The first page can be made more user friendly, as I have increased font sizes already and thinking about new color set with new landing page. Looking forward to hear more feedback, negative or postive, all welcome. We have been doing a little SEO but needs hard keyword research to find best keywords to rank. That's why we have not yet been ranked by google :(

06-16-2014, 06:23 AM

kiwistech

Post removed..
kiwistech - I warned you on a sister site to stop posting links like that.

This is your last warning.

Site Administrator

06-16-2014, 07:40 AM

alexjames212

Hi kiwistech,

I just reviewed your website and found lots of issues from an SEO perspective. For instance, i found that all your pages do not come with unique meta descriptions. It is good that you have an account in Google Analytics, but i suspect that it is not properly monitored. In some of the pages, instead of writing meta descriptions, you have just stuffed some keywords, this is not regarded as a good strategy. Moreover, you are taking a great risk by following such a strategy because search engine may regard it as keyword stuffing which again points to an black hat SEO technique. Therefore, kindly consider resolving these issues. There are tons of other issues and if you are interested, we could discuss it.

Thanks,

07-02-2014, 05:23 AM

tarquinhall

I check your website. It's perfect E-commerce type website. Start SEO to get more visitor and make perfect and unique keyword.

07-02-2014, 05:37 AM

bglddavies

I would ignore deathshadow, he sounds
1. 14
2. Picky

you asked for a review of the site not the code which is what I will do.

Firstly my loading time was less than 3 seconds, it was very quick, no need to optimize further so the CSS being longer than your HTML thing is just stoopid.
Secondly I think the colour scheme is a bit garish, too in your face. When people are buying products they want to be relaxed so that they feel they are making smart choices, also if the colours are more subtle the user gets that feel of quality and feels assured that everything is legit (shopping online scares the crap out of people).

The banner slider slides too quick I think, it hurt my eyes a little especially since they display mostly phones which at that speed just look like bars of colour.

I liked the responsive design, everything cascades nicely.

Just my first impressions!

07-06-2014, 02:32 AM

killinspre

Quote:

Originally Posted by bglddavies

I would ignore deathshadow, he sounds
1. 14
2. Picky

you asked for a review of the site not the code which is what I will do.

AMEN!!!

Loaded within 3 seconds even for such extensive content. Well done :)

07-06-2014, 06:38 AM

kiwistech

It is loading smoothly on my browser. It is not taking much time to load. Did you notice the social media icons are not properly aligned?